‘CRIMINALS IN THE CLOUD’

Please feel free to comment on my review.

This ‘Spider-Man’ episode has our web-slinger fighting against a criminal who hates all ‘ground-dwellers’. Really? That’s his motivation as a villain? The villain happens to be called Skymaster. Really? That’s his villain name? And he happens to be a green-skinned man that wears white gloves.

I’m sensing a pattern here. First, we had the Master Technician who was a green-skinned Doc Brown-type mad scientist character in ‘Swing City’. Now we have the Skymaster who looks green-skinned. I wonder if these villains are related to the Incredible Hulk. That would make a lot of sense.

Anyway, Skymaster sabotages the attempts of a high school football match by kidnapping the son of a Mr. Robinson called Roy Robinson. Honestly, I don’t know why they couldn’t get Flash Thompson to be that character in the series. Flash likes football, doesn’t he? Why is he replaced by this person?

Also, Peter tries to get a date with a girl called Susan, but she’s not interested. Again, wouldn’t it make sense to have someone like Liz Allan turn down a date invitation from Peter. Liz surely would’ve been interested in Flash in school at the time. Why do we have these carbon copies in this?

Peter tries to impress Susan by being in the football team. Instead, he ends up being a water boy. Not that I’ve seen the Adam Sandler film, but I think that’s rock bottom for Peter. Once Peter hears Roy Robinson has been kidnapped by the Skymaster, he goes out as Spidey to rescue that footballer.

At this point, the action sequences aren’t great and I’ve lost interest in the episodes in Season 2. I wish we had the Season 1 episodes back. At least they were entertaining with their stories. I know I wish for full-length half an hour episodes, but the effort put in these stories is astonishingly abysmal.

I also wish Peter got to take Roy’s place during the football game instead of helping him as Spider-Man to win the game for their team. I know the episode’s message is to say that Peter Parker has to lose in order to be good-natured, but I would like to see Peter be a winner rather than a loser in this.

So yeah, ‘Criminals in the Clouds’ was not especially impressive. I find that a lot of missed opportunities were made in Season 2 of the series and there isn’t enough ‘story’ given due to there being too many swinging shots of Spidey. I really find Season 2 pretty hard to endure by this point. 🙁

‘Criminals in the Clouds’ rating – 3/10